China’s chip maker Huawei has launched a new chip set series as China’s efforts to boost its domestic chip production is being thwarted by US-China trade war. The Asian giant being heavily dependent on USA, in a bid to achieve self-sufficiency has started several projects including Fujian Jinhua.
Huawei derives most of its revenues by selling smartphone and telecommunications equipment’s is looking to expand its reach in enterprise services and cloud computing. The shift comes in the wake of growing suspicions in the Western countries about the nature of Huawei’s equipment and Chinese Government’s influence on the company. Huawei’s CFO was recently arrested in Canada when the company refused to stop trade relations with Iran amid USA’s sanctions on the Middle Eastern country.
Chinese firms are trying to insulate themselves from the US-China trade war which has seen USA and China impose trade tariffs on each other’s imports.
Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon has designed the chipset called Kunpeng920 recently launched by the company. The chipset has raised the company’s status as a premier in semiconductor business. The chip is a 7 nanometer with a central processing unit (CPU) of 64 core. The chips architecture is inspired by British firm ARM’s design owned by Japan’s Softbank Group which is seeking to challenge the American dominance in sever-CPUs.
Huawei’s aim will harness the development of ARM ecosystem. The chip has unique advantage in power consumption and performance, according to the company. The company also clarified that the ARM CPU based server will not compromise its long-term strategic relationship with Intel Corp. Taishan Series of servers based on the chipset were also launched on Monday, which are built for ARM native applications, distributed storage and big data.
The firm’s subsidiary HiSilicon was founded in 2004 to reduce its heavy reliance on imports. The firm uses 54% of internally sourced chips while 22% comes from Qualcomm, says evidence placed in antitrust trial against Qualcomm.
The semiconductor Chip industry is facing a lot of turmoil in both USA and China. Reports claim that 13 Canadians were detained in China after the arrest and awaited extradition of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada. The business rivalry has turned into a diplomatic and political muscle-flexing. US-State department has also notified a travel advisory warning American citizens travelling to China about arbitrary enforcement of local laws in the country.